The Lives of Intelligent Robots

Will robots be slaves?
Will robots be all knowing?
How will robots be created?
Will there be male and female robots?
Will robots have legal rights?
Will there be varieties of robots?
Will robots marry and have children?
Will robots have different lives to humans?
Will robots think better than humans?
Will robots lie?
Will robots die?


I now come to the third part of the talk where I want to consider the lives of intelligent robots. What sorts of lives will intelligent robots live? First, I want to look at two popular misconceptions about intelligent robots.

Will robots be slaves?
Asimov's picture of robot life seems to view the robot as an intelligent slave. I think this is mistaken. Consider the following scenario. You come home from work, and find that your household robot sitting in your favourite armchair reading the paper. You are shocked, and ask why is it not doing the cleaning? The robot replies that it has finished all the cleaning, and wanted to see what was being discussed in the letters pages of the paper. Is this too fanciful? I think not. The trouble with Asimov's robots is that they are required to be autonomous and intelligent, but only within very circumscribed limits. If you want a robot to be curious and creative in its work, then it is likely to be in other aspects of its life.

Will robots be all knowing?
Other views of machine intelligence in science fiction see the machine as all knowing and purely logical. This again seems to me to be a mistaken view. Certainly there will be questions which we humans do not know the answer to, which an intelligent robot may be able to find the answer to very quickly since he will think much faster than we do. But it seems to me that there will always be things that the robot does not know. For example, it is not difficult to prove that the subject of pure mathematics is uncountably infinite, and therefore there are always new mathematical theorems to discover.

How will robots be created?
Science fiction seems to only deal with adult robots, manufactured with a vast amount of knowledge. This is certainly possible since once a robot has been brought up in a particular experience, its memory could be copied into other robots. However, each robot would have memory of its history, and thus each of these robots would still remember the same early memories. It seems more likely that robots will be brought up in a whole variety of experiences, and that robots will want to have some say in how they are brought up.

Will there be male and female robots?
It is not obvious to me that robots need necessarily have any gender at all. It seems perfectly possible to imagine a robot that is completely sexless. Ursula le Guin in her book "The Left Hand of Darkness" considers the possibility of a race with three genders. Of course, if one wanted male and female robots, then one needs to ask what this would actually mean. In Star Trek, Mr. Data is clearly a male robot, and indeed he is "perfectly equipped". But it is not clear that we would necessarily need to design robots with a specific gender. In this talk I have tended to talk about robots as "he", but they could equally well be "she" or "it".

Will robots have legal rights?
Once intelligent robots are recognised by humans as having legal rights, the robots will soon start to represent themselves in courts of law. The robots will thus be keen to protect their own interests, and they will have to be given equal rights to humans.

Will there be varieties of robots?
Some people think of robots as all being the same, but this is certainly very unlikely, and probably impossible. Given different experiences, robots will come to have different knowledge, and different approaches to questions. But it would also be possible to design robots in very different ways. Evolution has designed humans in a fairly haphazard way, for example, parts of our brains which were devoted to a sophisticated sense of smell are not used by the brain today. With the design of robot brains it would be possible to quickly improve on evolution, giving them more powerful memories, faster thinking speeds, and perhaps specialised perceptual abilities like infra-red cameras.

Will robots marry and have children?
It is not obvious that robots would necessarily either want to marry, or to have children. Some robots might prefer to live on their own, others might prefer to live in communities of robots, or in mixed communities with humans. Nevertheless, the possibility of a lifelong commitment of one robot for another is certainly a possibility. Likewise, mixed marriages between robots and humans are presumably possible, although here children would presumably be impossible, or at least difficult with today's science. If a robot was to have a child, it would not be necessary either for the robot to be female, or for the child to be born from within the robot's body. Nevertheless, robot parents might desire that some of their own design characteristics were incorporated within the new robot child. But it is not clear how a system as effective as genetic recombination could be effected in robots.

Will robots have different lives to humans?
The simple answer is yes. Robots will have some capabilities probably denied to humans, in particular until we develop matter transmission and Star Trek's transporter technology, only robots will be able to travel at the speed of light. It will be possible to transmit the complete design data of the current state of a robot from one place to another, and then implant this data in a new robot shell. This will enable robots to travel much further distances than humans.

Will robots think better than humans?
Robots are likely to think much faster than humans, and as a result assuming that they read they will also be better informed than humans. Robot-robot communication will also be better than human-human communication. As a consequence it is likely that many lines of human thought will have been rejected already as fruitless. However, robots could, in principle, have whole varieties of ideas, partly driven by their previous experience, and at the extreme might take views which others, even humans, might consider to be prejudiced.

Will robots lie?
I will argue in the next section that it will be possible for robots to sin, and therefore it will be possible for them to lie. Asimov thinks that robots will be incorruptible and therefore will make excellent politicians, but he may be mistaken in this view. However, there is the possibility of designing robots in such a manner that there thoughts are totally open, transparent and inspectable by other people. If this was done, then one would know if a robot had an ulterior motive in his actions, and thus lies would be detectable. However, robots might consider it to be an invasion of privacy to have one's every thought open to other peoples' inspection, and this view might prevail in the courts.

Will robots die?
This is a difficult question to answer. If a robot became ill, perhaps some circuit started to malfunction, then robot doctors would be morally obliged to cure the robot, perhaps by replacing the defective part. It is likely that in the fullness of time, such robot medicine would become relatively perfect, with very few robot illnesses not being treatable. As a result, one might consider that robots would live for ever. However, we need to look at how the knowledge the robot has develops over time. Given enough time, say a few hundred years, an old robot would inevitably be out of date compared to younger models. Certainly, he could have his processors updated, so that his thinking went faster, comparable to the current models. But, he would be stuck with his memories of the past. No robot would want his past memories destroyed, they make up part of his nature as a person. But the robot's previous knowledge inevitably shapes the way he understands the world. The first few years experience of the robot will probably shape the rest of his life. Thus, it is likely that as the robot gets older he will in time be more and more out of touch with his society. As a result of this changing nature of the robot as he gets older, he may increasingly think about deeper issues of existence, reflect on what good he has done in his life, and begin to look forward to death and the life hereafter. Thus there will probably be voluntary euthanasia for robots.

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